The super schoolers

So the new school year has begun and my offspring have both progressed a year with the little guy going into reception year or Grade R and the big guy donning a school uniform and starting Grade one.

For the big guy it was all about the uniform. The uniform represented a mental shift for him from little boy at preschool to a ‘big’ school kid. He must have tried on the uniform a dozen times over the holidays, just itching to wear it. Dropping him off in the morning, with that improbably large school bag draped over his valiant little shoulders, I swell with pride and sometimes actual human emotions threaten to spill out of my eyes and onto my manly cheeks as I watch him stride confidently into the school. I try not to show it of course, but on the days he turns around and gives me one of those whole body waves goodbye, where his arm arcs from his knees to the sky and he stands on tiptoes with a smile as wide as the ocean, I find myself having to take deep steady breaths to maintain my composure. Basically, I’m a big softie.

In high school he will most likely be slouching into school with a small satchel slung over one shoulder and a ‘cheers dad’ cast over the other. He’ll almost certainly be petitioning for the abolishment of school uniforms, of that I have no doubt and he will in all probability be defacing his school trousers by tapering them and wearing his hair just that little bit longer than the regulations allow.

For now though he’s as proud as a peacock of his uniform and uniformity and is following the rules beautifully. Long may it last.

The little guy was all business as usual. He seemed genuinely excited to start in his new class this year but I think the excitement had less to do with the fact that he was now in Grade R than the fact that there were new and exciting toys to play with. The rest of his routine hardly changed at all, chief amongst his habits being the need to finish his juice as we drop him off at his class while he surveys the toy landscape. Another huge plus for him is of course being able to play on the jungle gym equipment every morning before school. Whereas last year was always a mad rush to get to class on time, this year we find that the pre-school starts a good quarter of an hour later than the primary school and that affords my little champ ample time to burn off excess energy before being roped into the classroom to paint pictures, practice letterland, sing songs and learn Xhosa amongst all the other busy things they do.

He seems so small though. When I watch him run to his class to line up, I see my smiling little toddler, with clumsy little feet, completely wild hair and grubby hands. I find myself wanting to press pause and let him grow just a little more before he has to spend a whole day at school away from us. As I said, a softie.

He’s always going to be too little I think. One day he’ll be getting ready to sit behind the wheel of a car with a valid license in his pocket and I’m quite certain I’ll be panicking about the fact that my little free spirit is going to be doing such a grown up thing. As an aside, here’s a public service announcement, that day is less than thirteen years away, you should all be making preparations for it.

For the big guy, along with this change in his schooling dynamic, comes an endless stream of questions. He requires an explanation for literally everything. If I say come here, he says why. If I say pick that up, he says why. If I say talk quietly he says why. It’s not cheek mind you, he genuinely wants the answers. Why do the stars move? Why are there no more dinosaurs? Why did the emperor trick Anakin into becoming Vader? I tell you, I need an extra hour of sleep at night dedicated to recovering from answering the why questions. Also, he seems to radiate energy, sometimes it’s as a long stream of speech that escapes from him like air leaving a steam whistle and sometimes it’s in the form of continuous movement, like a small boat hurtling down a whitewater rapid. Sometimes the energy just escapes as loud farts and sometimes they’re the quiet kind. He’s a boy after all.

The little guy is like a train, he’s on his own track and has planned his journey well in advance. Really, once he’s made his mind up about something, changing it requires a superhuman effort on our part. We have to get ahead of him, flip the switch and then make our way back to the caboose to convince him that the change we’ve made for him (ahead on the tracks) is in his best interests. He can also do deadpan looks like no one else I know. The look can disarm you and make you doubt who’s actually in charge. At times he seems capable of having an entire conversation with you without uttering a word at all, instead deftly handling questions you ask him with inscrutable looks. He also farts.

The little guys seem to be developing new and baffling idiosyncrasies almost faster than we can keep up. When they grow up, they want to be anything from paleontologist or pilot to professional inventor or super hero. Batman was mentioned recently but Robin did not feature and I can understand that, his outfit was never going to be as cool as the Dark Knight’s

I’m going to make sure I watch the little guys very closely this year, I don’t want to miss the moment they turn into superheroes.